Brad Ricca on the pre-history of Lois Lane

Over at DC Women Kicking Ass, Brad Ricca, author of the soon-to-be-released “Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — The Creators of Superman” has made a guest-post detailing the evolution of Lois Lane through Siegel and Shuster’s early pre-Superman stories.

What I want to talk about here is how Jerry and Joe got to Lois in the comics – she didn’t just spring out, fully-formed, after all – she evolved, changed, and transformed through a series of characters that Jerry and Joe did in their early, pre-Superman comics. Lois took her time. And because these early comics have never really been reprinted since the thirties, no one has seen them for a long time.

As anyone who has read the earliest Superman stories by Siegel and Shuster, Lois was far from just a damsel in distress cliché. Here antecedents give an even broader look at Siegel’s and Shuster’s progressive — at least for 1930s fiction — toward depiction of women.

Ricca takes you from the fictional Lois Amster of “Doctor Occult” through the fiery Sally Norris of “Slam Bradley” and several points in between. Click on over to the site to read the whole thing.